🤖 The Bot Schizophrenia 🤖
In 4 months, I red a tone of post and articles about conversational commerce and interacted with many Chatbots. There is no doubt, the world as we know is about to be rewritten again. Bots are awesome.
Bots are awesome but at this time, we can not talk about a Tech Revolution. Too much bots are still just apps inside a conversational user interface. They do not bring more value than a very familiar interface with very low frictions. I hope this is not the future of Chatbots. I don’t want my experience with the bot to be the same as in the app. I don’t want my experience with the bot to be the same as my friend’s conversation with the same bot. I mean a bot should be always very kind towards me and treat me as a very unique person.
For example when I go shopping, the salesman has not the same interaction with me than he had with another client half an hour before. When I call the customer service of my mobile operator, I do not have the same experience with the agent who picked up the phone than another customer. Because this other customer and I are not facing the same issue, we do not feel the same. Maybe he has been waited half an hour to reach someone and is very nervous. And finally we probably do not reached the same agent.
So I definitely agree that bots should be internally consistent in the content that they provide. However, I don’t think a bot should stick to a single style of language according to the brand voice. Bots should know their audience, understand perfectly who I am by chatting with me and adapt their styles to my personality.
Bots should be schizophrenic.
Interacting with a bot, I just want to find what I am not able to find on the website or in the app. I want to engage with the brand. I am seeking advise from the bot. I don’t want the bot to suggest me a bunch of answers. I want to respond in natural language, I want to chat, to be understood, and to find someone who is able to satisfy my need in a very personalized way.
There is no doubt that customers will have a very high level of requirements towards bots. Bots who won’t be able to satisfy those will probably fail and die. Maybe at the beginning bots should work hand in hand with human agents ready to take over more complex situations. Bots should be over available, night and day, ready to help you and to act in your interest more than in the interest of the brand. In this way bots are schizophrenic as well.
In 2012, Doc Searls, a journalist, columnist, blogger and alumnus fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University came out with an visionary book called The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012), It begins this way:
“ This book stands with the customer. This is out of necessity, not sympathy. Over the coming years customers will be emancipated from systems built to control them. They will become free and independent actors in the marketplace, equipped to tell vendors what they want, how they want it, where and when — even how much they’d like to pay — outside of any vendor’s system of customer control. Customers will be able to form and break relationships with vendors, on customers’ own terms, and not just on the take-it-or-leave-it terms that have been pro forma since Industry won the Industrial Revolution. … Demand will no longer be expressed only in the forms of cash, collective appetites, or the inferences of crunched data over which the individual has little or no control. Demand will be personal ”.
I am really convinced that Chatbots could represent a huge opportunity for the rise of the Intention Economy. Conversational commerce and Intention Economy are still two hot trends in 2016. But Chatbots may well become the medium of the Intention Economy and give birth to a Tech and Marketing Revolution in the coming months.
Thanks to Matt Schlicht for having launched Chatbots Magazine and for giving us the opportunity to share and discuss on the Bot Revolution. What do you think about making a weekly Facebook live discussion dedicated to Bots? We pick a topic and share all together one hour a week, live on Facebook.
I am building Alix to help you save time and money while you shop, to discover the best brands at the very moment, it is absolutely free and only by SMS, we will launch soon :) If you are interested, feel free to join the beta-tester list, It will be amazing!
Push this little white heart below as it will become green and feel free to comment, don’t be shy :-)
PS: sorry for my English, I am French and I am trying to write often and to not think too much about it…
